


a heart like a trapped bird

by valety



Category: Odin Sphere
Genre: Codependency, F/M, Insecurity, POV Second Person, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 18:28:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12917685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valety/pseuds/valety
Summary: It’s easier to want to live when you have something (or someone) to be living for, but that can come with its own set of complications.





	a heart like a trapped bird

**Author's Note:**

> alternate title: The Continued Adventures of Two Codependent Trainwrecks Doing Their Best To Unlearn Unhealthy Patterns And Maintain A Healthy Relationship Despite Having No Idea What That Even Looks Like
> 
> warnings for codependent thinking, self-negativity, depictions of the aftereffects of trauma (probably not full-blown PTSD in this context), and references to suicidal ideation, grief, and past emotional neglect. there are also references to what might be considered chronic illness (due to oswald’s whole *waves hands vaguely* _state_ at this point in canon), but the symptoms are not graphically depicted 
> 
> the contract at the beginning is taken directly from the text archive in leifthrasir
> 
> I've definitely taken some liberties with canon, including with the timeline. please don't beat me up

The contract is old, written on yellowing parchment and signed with a fading hand. Dried blood is smeared across the page. You don’t know who the blood belongs to. You’re not sure you want to know.

It says:

_I seek a contract with the beautiful Queen Odette._

_I ask for the power of darkness for our crystal sword. The blade shall drink the blood of the soldiers of your hated foe, the Demon Lord, and raise a mountain of corpses._

_I offer in return the flesh and soul of the swordsman Oswald._

_Each use of his power shall entitle you to one organ and one bone._

_Oswald’s body and soul are far superior to all humans I have offered you thus far. I trust you will find him to your liking._

_On my true name, I pledge._

_Nephew to the queen of Ringford,_

_Duke Melvin_

The words on the page blur and spin the longer you stare at them. What little you had known of Oswald’s past, both from gossip in Ragnanival and what he’s since told you himself, had not prepared you for the reality of seeing the terms of the deal lain out so plainly.

You lift your head. Oswald looks exhausted—unsurprising, given how he’s been confined to bed following an unexpected collapse. His face is paler than usual, the circles below his eyes even darker. But despite all that, he seems almost relaxed. Perhaps he’s gotten used to being in such a state.

“I would have been too young to sign it myself, presumably,” he says almost conversationally. “Hence my father doing so on my behalf. He wasn’t the one who gave that to me, though. The new queen of Ringford gave Brom permission to take my belongings with him when he left her service. I suppose he found it among my father’s papers and thought it qualified.”  

“That he did not even show you the contract himself is...”

“I doubt he saw the point in telling me the details,” Oswald says. “A blacksmith does not regale each sword he forges with the story of its making.”

“Perhaps that is true of blacksmiths, but a father should be different,” you answer sharply. You are no longer trembling from the sheer force of your indignation, meaning you can let it slip a little, allowing it to feed the bite of your words. “That he would sign such a contract on your behalf, when he knew full well what it would do to you, and then not even _tell_ you—that’s monstrous.”

Oswald makes no reply to that, but you don’t really want one. Anything he said right then would likely only make you angrier.

But you don’t _want_ to be angry, either, and so you set the contract down on the bedside table, on what little space remains beside the assortment of potions. Rising from your chair, you join your husband on the bed itself, looping your arm with his as you too recline against the mound of pillows. You feel him start slightly at your touch, jumping as though burned, but then his hand finds yours and your fingers weave together, tightly, tightly.

You curl against him, close your eyes, and try to pretend that’s all there is.

But of course it’s not that easy. If it _were_ that easy, Oswald wouldn’t be in bed right now at all.

Exertion often makes him weak these days, he says. It’s new for him, and so it’s just as strange for him as it is for you, he says. You had known this, to an extent, and it had been quite some time since he’d collapsed, in fact, but something—the change in the weather, perhaps—was causing him to grow weak sooner than usual. Today, he’d only made it as far as the outskirts of Elrit Forest before you’d had to carry him back.

You’d felt responsible, as though you should have somehow been able to sense what Oswald had been trying so hard to hide from you, no matter how many times he’d insisted that it wasn’t your fault. He had shown you the contract as an explanation, but it’s only now that you’ve seen the precise terms that you understand.

That he is even here right now is a miracle.

 

 

They—Oswald, Myris, Brom—assure you he won’t die. Queen Odette is gone and there’s no one left to lay claim to what little of him remains. It’s simply a matter of being careful with a body that’s already been weakened, both from the contract and from years of battle. Neither of you have anything to do with wars now, and so there’s no reason to believe he will ever need to draw his sword again, no reason to believe his condition will ever worsen. Over and over again, you and Oswald hear the words, _just don’t overdo it._  

But while Oswald may have recovered from his collapse, you are more aware of him now than you were before, and what you see makes you uneasy.

Even when he isn’t sick or injured, he tires easily, more easily than you would like. At night, when you listen to him breathing, you hear him wheeze, air rattling about his lungs. Occasionally you see him stop and clutch his chest or wince in pain, and you wonder; just how many invisible injuries does he try and hide from you? How much pain is he in when you embrace him? Would he tell you? _Does_ he tell you?

Once upon a time, you had believed that death only haunted the battlefield, came suddenly and swiftly and was marked by the spilling of blood. You hadn’t realized that your mother with her gaunt face and the feverish lips on your forehead had been in danger, far from the battlefield as she was.

You won’t make that mistake again.

 

 

You want to help if you can. You ask how, but Oswald only ever shakes his head, saying _please don’t worry about me_ or _I’ve had it worse_ before changing the subject. Sometimes he even smiles, as if to reassure you, as if he doesn’t realize you can tell when a smile isn’t natural for him.

You stop asking. You don’t want to badger him, fearing that excessive displays of concern could lead to an argument. But that doesn’t mean you stop worrying—only that you take it upon _yourself_ to find something you can do, having realized that no matter what you offer, Oswald will not take it.

It seems at first that what you can do is ‘very little.’ With only a rudimentary knowledge of medicine, having only ever learned enough to concoct your own emergency potions on the battlefield, you know you’re more a hindrance than a help in a sickroom. When your mother had fallen ill, you had been permitted to stay with her, not having yet had spear training to occupy your time like Griselda did; but while _she_ may have been happy with your fluffing pillows and bringing tea with too much sugar, you’re not a child anymore. Your duty is to be useful, not get underfoot in the hopes of earning praise.

In lieu of medicine, you turn to practical work instead. Being so old, the castle was in something of a state of disrepair upon your awakening. With the seasons slowly changing, it’s becoming more necessary that something be done about it, especially with you and Myris being the only castle inhabitants accustomed to true winter. The speculation that the change in the weather may have worsened Oswald’s condition ramps the level of importance from _necessary_ to _urgent_ in your mind, and so you help do your best to help Brom with the repairs; the replacement of windows, the mending of doorframes, the installation of heat vents, all ideas for comfort and warmth carried over from your time spent in Ragnanival.

When not assisting with repairs, you do your best to keep useful in other ways. More often than not, that finds you in Elrit Forest, hunting mandragoras to help restock the medicine stores with. These are the periods of time in which you are the calmest, fear never further from your mind than when you have your spear in hand. Part of it is the simple familiarity of your weapon’s weight, but a greater part of it is the comfort you draw from the knowledge that—should you ever need to—you are still strong enough to protect yourself. So long as you stay strong, then Oswald will never _have_ to wield his sword for you, and with every slash and strike and shower of phozons, you grow ever stronger.  

All that you do, you do with Oswald in mind. You try, in the small, clumsy ways available to you, to ease the pain you know he must be in. You know your gestures are graceless ones—that mending windows and hunting mandragoras have none of the romance of nursing him back to health the way the heroine in a novel might—but it’s work that suits you; solid, practical work that lets you move and grit your teeth and sweat and _see_ just what it is that you’re accomplishing.

Although.  

Although... you wonder sometimes just how much you’re actually helping.

It nags at you—the vague, miserable suspicion that your efforts are just busywork. Even worse are the moments where you wonder if you might possibly be somehow making things _worse,_ even if you can’t say how, even if no one tells you so directly. If that might possibly be the case, then wouldn’t it be better if you stopped?

But you do not stop. You continue working, and hope that someday it will mean something.

 

 

One night, you wake up.

The reason why isn’t immediately apparent. Then it hits you: the silence. You’ve grown accustomed to the sound of Oswald’s wheezing, but that night, the room is quiet.  

It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they do, you see that he’s still laying beside you, eyes shut, face still. You think you can see his chest rising, but—you realize with a flicker of fear—you can’t tell for sure, not in the dark.

You move towards him slowly. You don’t want to wake him, not if he’s actually sleeping peacefully for once; you just want to know.

You place your head against his chest, carefully, carefully. For a moment, you don’t know that you can hear it, but then—there. The faint drumming in his chest. The sound of a heart still beating. 

You close your eyes, keeping your head against the sound. You want to continue listening.

You tell yourself: so long as that heart stays beating, then everything is well. So long as that heart stays beating, then _he_ is well.

And you want that. You want that very, very badly.

You feel almost ashamed of that wanting. It shouldn’t hold such power over you. Not now, not after everything you’ve experienced.

That to die is frightening; that to lose someone is painful; such thoughts are almost childish in their simplicity. But childish or not, they’re new for you. To die _is_ frightening, and to lose someone _is_ painful. You don’t want to die as much anymore, and you don’t want to lose anyone else, either, not after having lost so much already. You want to live, and you want to not be alone when you do it.

That means he must live too.

You can’t imagine wanting to live this badly for anybody else.

It _has_ to be him. He has seen you at your worst and has never stopped forgiving you. He has seen your scars and heard your darker thoughts and has always pulled you out of them when they’ve become all you could see. He understands so much of you that you barely understand yourself, and he asks so very, very little in return, so little that you fear sometimes that all of this will fall apart when he realizes that you are not worth so very much on your own after all.  

Until then... if there is something, _anything_ you can do for him...

Maybe you can’t make his pain go away. You can’t end his contract for him, and you can’t restore the strength that he once knew. You can’t go back in time and keep him safe from whatever ugliness took place in Ringford. But right here, right now, you can try and make it a little easier for him. You can make the castle warmer, bring Myris what she needs to make his medicines, keep him company if your company is all he’ll ever ask.  

That can be enough. You need to trust that. As much as possible, you need to trust that.

In his sleep, Oswald winds an arm around you, pulling you closer than you already were. Your heart leaps in your throat at his touch; you close your eyes and will your pulse to settle down.

You are close enough now to feel the rise and fall of his chest with every breath. You count the spaces in-between until yours match. Only then can you fall asleep again yourself. 

 

 

The next time you awaken, it’s morning. The gray light slipping through a gap in the curtains tells you that the sun has barely risen. The world feels as though it’s holding its breath.

Oswald’s arms are still around you, but now your arms have wrapped around him as well. Your legs are tangled together, his chin tucked into your hair. You do your best to register each sensation slowly, processing them one by one; you know that to take them in in any other way will overwhelm you. Even so, it takes an embarrassing amount of willpower to keep yourself from burying against him anymore than you already are.

Eventually, Oswald’s breathing changes, but he doesn’t move until you say, “Good morning.”  

“I thought you were sleeping still,” he mumble. His voice is languid enough to make it sound as though he’s still asleep himself. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”  

His arms leave your waist and he shifts as if to rise from bed. A thought flashes through your mind— _I don’t want to let go_ —and on an impulse, you tighten your embrace.

Oswald stops.

“Just a little longer,” you say into his chest.

You can’t see his face, but you feel him settling back down. “Is something wrong?” he asks, sounding more awake.

You don’t look up. You keep your face pressed to his chest. It might be your imagination, but you think you feel his heartbeat quickening.  

“Nothing is wrong,” you say.

It’s a lie. It’s the sort of lie you’re used to telling, the sort meant to avert gazes—both others’ and your own—from feelings you’re not supposed to be feeling. The familiarity of it means it comes easily to you, but once it slips out, you’re left with an unpleasant taste in your mouth. Because there _is_ something wrong, and lying to Oswald feels... unnatural. You've both been used and lied to by so many that you've all but sworn to never do with each other, and yet here you are, acting as though just because it's a lie about yourself, that somehow makes it any less dishonest. 

So you say, “I have been worried about you lately, actually."

“Why?” Oswald asks. He sounds confused and it almost annoys you. He can’t possibly not _know_ , you think, until you remember: it’s Oswald. He does not think much about himself at all, because he does not expect anybody else to. That is the problem.

“You collapsed not long ago,” you point out.  

“I apologize,” he answers immediately. “Such weakness was—”

“No,” you interrupt. “Don’t apologize, please. I have never thought of it as weakness. It was only that... I had not realized how many close calls you have already had, until I understood the reason for them, and realized how many more there might _be,_ if we are not careful. It makes me feel... uneasy.”

“I apologize,” Oswald says again, but now that you’ve begun to speak, you find you must keep going; the words are coming too quickly for you to stop. 

“The road to the Netherworld is closed, now,” you continue, words thick in your throat. “I was able to bring you back _once,_ but that is a miracle I am never going to be able to repeat.” Your hands tighten on his back; it is a miracle you are never going to be able to repeat, and it is only so long as you can feel him next to you that you know you will not have to. “There is little I can do, otherwise. At least, you do not _tell_ me what I can do, and so I... I find myself worrying instead.”

Oswald is silent for so long once you’ve finished that you find yourself growing afraid you may have crossed some sort of line. Perhaps you should not have spoken at all, you think. Perhaps your concern is only a burden. Perhaps—

“I am... not used to people worrying about me,” Oswald says, interrupting the spiral of your thoughts. He speaks slowly, carefully, in the way that means the words do not come easily and he wants to make sure he gets them right. “I was. Ashamed of you seeing me break down like that, before. I thought my weakness could only be an inconvenience to you. I did not realize you were so troubled over it.”

“Of course I was troubled!” you cry. You finally draw back, pulling your head away from his chest so you can glare at him. “How could I _not_ be? I...”

You stop. You don’t quite know how you’d been about to finish that statement, only that your impulsivity is rarely considerate of your self-consciousness. Already you feel embarrassed over having grown angry, however brief it was. You lower your eyes.

“You matter to me,” you say, keeping your eyes fixed on a dip in the mattress so that you do not have to meet his gaze. “You matter a great deal. It pains me to hear you speak as though you cannot understand how much, or as though you do not think that I would care about your suffering. You have been so good to me—I wish to be good to you in turn, if only you would let me.”

“You have already done me so much good,” Oswald replies. His hand finds the one you still have resting on his hip and he twines his fingers with yours. You look up despite yourself; the expression on his face is a soft one. “I have not even begun to repay you for all that you have already done.”

“I haven’t—” you begin. You want to say _I haven’t done anything for you yet,_ but he shakes his head.

“You saved me from the Netherworld,” he points out.

“I was to blame for what happened. I was only doing my duty.” You were being selfish, too. The thought of having lost him and your only chance to make things right had terrified you. Surely an action so self-motivated didn’t qualify as _good._

“That was not the only time you saved me, though,” Oswald says. “Back in Ringford... after my father died, I lost all will to fight the Halja. But in the Netherworld, I saw a bird.” His cheeks pinken. “I felt compelled to follow it. When I saw you later, I realized that it had reminded me of you. Perhaps it had simply been my imagination or a hallucination, but... I would still be lost now, had it not been for my thinking of you. You saved me then as well.”

“You cannot credit me for that,” you counter. You are trying desperately to ignore how hot your cheeks have grown. “If it could have been your imagination...”

“It was still the thought of you that gave me the strength I needed to carry on,” Oswald says. His thumb strokes your knuckles, and you think briefly that you ought to pull away, but find your hand will not cooperate. “The thought of you still does. Back then, I could not have imagined choosing to continue living. But for your sake, I did not simply choose it; I became willing to fight for it. _That_ is the good you have already done me.”

"Oh,” is all you can think to say to that.

There is, theoretically, an argument you could make. You could say, _but you are the one who slayed the dragon; you are the one who went through fire for me; you are the one who showed me I could be loved; you did not just make me want to live; you are the one who made me feel as though I were ever even alive at all._ But there is so much tenderness in Oswald’s eyes that you find you do not have the will to argue, even though he’s saying something as inconceivable as _you have already done enough._

You find instead that you can almost believe him.  

That doesn't make it any more acceptable that he's trying to carry the weight of his curse alone, though. It's one thing to do your best to believe him when he says there's no need for you to _earn_ his continued affection; to take that to mean that you need do nothing for him at all, even when he's suffering, would make you no better than those who've used him in the past. 

“Oswald,” you venture. “If you truly feel that way, then... may I ask you something?”

“Anything,” he replies immediately.  

You tell yourself that it’s the early-morning feeling that makes it easier than usual to set your caution aside and gently free your hand from his. There is something about the early hour that makes the moment feel almost dreamlike, as though you’re still half-asleep after all, and that makes it easier than it should have been to be bold; to pull yourself upright, bracing yourself on the mattress with one palm so you can cup his cheek with the other.

You lean forward, hair slipping over your shoulders like a curtain, and press your mouth to his.

The kiss is feather-light, but when you draw back, you see that Oswald’s eyes are very, very wide.

“Promise that you will continue fighting, as you have said you will,” you say. “But know also that you will not be the only one who’s doing so.”

“What do you mean?” Oswald asks. He looks almost dazed. Perhaps it was unfair of you to kiss him before speaking, but you couldn’t help it; you wanted to very, very badly.

“Odette is gone, but...should anyone ever attempt to take her place, then...then they will have to go through me,” you say. You let your hand drift down from his cheek to his chest, where your head had been pressed only moments ago, listening to the sound you’ve grown so protective of. “Your contract may promise them one organ and one bone, but your heart, at least, belongs to me as well now. I won’t give it up so easily. Promise you will remember that. Promise you will remember that there is someone who cares about you.”

“I promise,” Oswald says, and something in you calms at last.

 

 

There is a point, eventually, where Myris grows impatient and you run out of excuses to stay in bed, and so you have to rise.

Although the night before had been unusually quiet, Oswald moves slowly that day, grimacing when he seems to think you can’t see. When you notice how he favours his left side, you ask him how he’s doing; he hesitates a moment, looking as though he wants to say _nothing,_ but in the end says, “My old injuries ache when it’s cold. It’s not unbearable, just uncomfortable.”

You’re not _relieved,_ exactly. It’s just that old wounds aching is something you can understand in a way that a curse eating away at someone’s strength isn’t. Your own left shoulder is something you need to be careful with, in fact, ever since you took that shot from a fairy archer during the early days of the Cauldron War.  

That evening, you warm a blanket by the fireplace, then take it to the library where you know Oswald is lingering. He looks startled when you drape it over his shoulders, but before he can protest or ask you why, you pull the blanket over your own shoulders as well, joining him on the sofa so the two of you can be enfolded in the relief-bringing heat together.  

You see him smiling when you glance up at him, and it’s not forced or shadowed _._ You find yourself smiling back, and that doesn’t feel unnatural either.

You close your eyes, allowing yourself to lean against him—carefully, so as not to hurt him—and you feel him do the same, leaning into you with just the same amount of care. Any uncertainty you may have felt vanishes then, allowing only love to take its place; and so the two of you lean on one another by the firelight, as beyond the castle walls, the world continues spinning into winter.


End file.
